The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
Animated Conversation
Miles Strous

Cartoon character animation looks like fun - after watching television cartoons and seeing some animated cartoon movies, I wanted to try my hand at a hobby equivalent. 

These days a number of programs are starting to emerge which are inexpensive enough for the home hobbyists like myself to dabble in this arena on their existing home computers. 

The Web has certainly had an influence in the production of this software, with the emergence of animated GIFs and Macromedia Flash animation, while television animation such as South Park has shown us that impressive but time-consuming smooth Disney-quality animation is not always necessary for entertainment. 

Searching for 2D animation software on the Web reveals a wide range of functionality. Some programs merely take individual drawn frames (scanned or created in other software) and combine them into an animation format, possibly allowing you to scale or move layers. Others take scanned pencil animation frames and provide digital ink and colour features. Other programs enable you to paint each individual frame on the computer. Some programs treat each layer separately, others provide a way of copying painted areas or shapes from one layer to the next, or painting on several layers at once. Less common are the vector-based programs that enable you to create a shape and then animate the shape itself. 

An alternative technique is the use of 3D software, using either the "toon" rendering styles becoming available in many 3D programs (see Figure 1, created using Animation:Master from Hash Inc, http://www.hash.com/) , or using thin flat shapes layered on top of each other, so that when seen from a certain angle they represent a 2D cartoon figure (see Figure 1, where I have given each shape some thickness to make the concept clearer). Naturally, the two techniques can be successfully combined.


Figure 1. Using 3D software for 2D cartoons : "toon" rendering style and/or flat objects.

While South Park was professionally animated using the excellent but expensive SoftImage software, the home hobbyist may wish to consider less expensive alternatives. If you are interested in Flash output for the web, Macromedia Flash (http://www.macromedia.com/, A$820) is a professional choice with great animation features. However, if you are merely dabbling and you are looking for a hobbyist price, you may wish to consider programs such as KoolMoves (http://www.koolmoves.com/, US$29.95) or Insane Flash Animator (http://www.insanetools.com/, normal price US$39.95 but currently available for US$19.95). Swish is a nice Flash text animation tool available at http://www.swishzone.com/ for US$30 and version 2.0, available as in public beta at the time of writing, allows you to import vector clipart and apply animation settings but manipulation features for cartoon character animation are almost non-existent. 

If you are happy to create animation by painting frames rather than moving and reshaping vector objects, a number of hobbyist-price alternatives exist, such as Totally Hip WebPainter (http://www.totallyhip.com/, US$89.95), Cosmigo Pro Motion (http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/, US$58, Lite version US$19.95), JASC Animation Shop (http://www.jasc.com/, US$39), Sonic Foundry Viscosity, formerly Jedor Viscosity (http://www.sonicfoundry.com/, US$69.97), and Animato (http://www.lakeclear.com/animato.htm, US$34.95, specifically designed for GIF animation) 

If you can justify a professional budget for animation software, other professional programs range from intermediate prices of a few hundred dollars for multimedia-targeted software up to cinematic-oriented studio animation software priced at several thousand dollars with annual service fees, sometimes requiring specialised hardware. If you're interested in trying higher end software, Linker Animation Stand provides a personal Windows edition of their animation software for free, downloadable from http://www.linker.com/, limited to 256 x 192 pixel resolution. 

Another relatively inexpensive 2D program enabling the hobbyist to dabble in cartoon animation is the oddly-named Moho from the equally whimsical Lost Marble. Aimed at producing AVI files or Quicktime MOV files, Moho enables you to draw, colour, and animate vector-based cartoons, and includes the highly useful bones animation feature, not found in any other inexpensive 2D animation software that I know of (see Figure 2), although a more advanced professional version of KoolMoves, due out later this year, may include bones. You don't have to do all your animation in Moho using bones - you can also animate shape outlines directly, or manipulate whole layers.


Figure 2. Screen capture and rendered images from Moho, showing the bones used for animation.

The vector-based nature of the software allows you to draw a character from one angle, add bones, and then animate the shapes and/or the bones rather than re-drawing the character on each frame as required by some pencil test software. If you wish to animate a figure you have already sketched on paper, or a cartoon caricature of somebody, Moho includes a tracing facility to enable you to trace vector outlines over a scanned picture. 

Moho can import still images and animation files from other sources to use as layers, textures, allowing you to add 2D animation to live footage or photographic backgrounds, or mix 2D animation with 3D or 2D animation from other software (see Figure 3).


Figure 3. Different styles within a Moho animation.

As well as animating vector cartoons, Moho also enables you to take bitmap artwork (scanned or created in other graphics software) and animate it in a "paper cutout" style (see Figure 3), in a similar manner to CreaToon, a cutout-style animation program at http://www.creatoon.com/, selling for about US$275. 

Figure 3 displays some of the different styles possible within Moho - the "witchdoctor" and rabbit cartoon characters are 2D drawn vectors (with and without outlines and depth "shading") created completely within Moho, the dragon peeking from behind the tree is a toy scanned on a flatbed scanner and converted to a "cutout" figure (in a freeware paint program) with bones added in Moho for animation and posing, the pot is an imported 3D render with an alpha channel, the background uses Moho shapes with an imported 2D bitmap texture for the sky, and the tree is an imported vector file from a separate illustration/drawing program with the texture of the tree trunk added in Moho. 

A trial version of Moho is available from their website at http://www.lostmarble.com/. It watermarks the output files but is otherwise fully functional. Originating on BeOS, the software has now also been ported to both Windows and MacOS, and will cost you US$99 for a version that outputs files without the watermark. 

One of the first things you learn when using a program such as Moho is that good character animation is a lot of hard work. However, if you're willing to put up with your somewhat wonky first animation efforts it is a lot of fun. 

While most animation requires persistence and skill, one feature that can be aided to a certain extent with software is lip-synching, the ability to match mouth shapes to recorded voices so that your cartoon character appears to be speaking rather than just flapping their mouth during voice-over.


Figure 4. Aligning phonemes with sound.

Advanced animation software may have this lip-synching feature built-in, or it may be available as a plug-in or separate utility. At its most basic, lip-synch software enables you to line up mouth shapes with the sections of sound made by those mouth positions (see Figure 4), giving you audio feedback for the alignment of phonemes and often providing a visual representation of the sound waveform to assist this alignment.


Figure 5. Multiple mouth shapes created by the user.


Figure 6. Mouth shapes overlaid on a character and animated.

 

 

 
Moho has recent introduced Switch groups, which enable you to draw several mouth shapes on separate layers (see Figure 5) then switch between them to give the appearance of animated mouth movement (see Figure 6). 

However, a separate lip-synch utility (see Figure 4) is needed to generate the timing data (see Table 1) for the Switch file. The screenshot shown in Figure 4 is taken from my own lip-synch utility, currently under development, but if you want a working program now for current lip-synch projects, I'd recommend trying Magpie, a shareware program available from http://www.thirdsimplewishsoftware.com which can be registered for US$65. 

Be aware that Moho does not currently provide any sound-handling functionality - once you have rendered your switching mouth shapes into an animation, you must then use other software to combine the animation with the sound file used for creating the lip-synch data. One possibility is the freeware video editor ABC VideoRoll, available from http://www.abc-tv.com/. 

So, for lip-synch in Moho, you proceed along the following steps :

  • from a sound file of recorded speech, create the Switch layer data file (see Table at right) using a lip-synch utility (such as Magpie)
  • model your character and the required mouth shapes (see Figure 5) in Moho (some samples designed for use with Magpie are supplied with Moho)
  • import the Switch layer data file into Moho, and drag and drop the mouth shapes into the switch layer
  • render the animation in Moho (to AVI or Quicktime formats, or render each frame to form a set of separate sequentially numbered bitmap images)
  • combine the animated video and the sound file in a video-editing program
MohoSwitch1
3
7
11
15
19
22
25
27 		K
R
AH
M
Z
CH
IY
F

A similar process applies in other software used for character animation, although the exact details may vary considerably. Of course, animating mouth movement in this way tends to give a slightly mechanical result - all M sounds have have exactly the same mouth shape, and the same applies to all the other mouth shapes. Therefore, once you have finished the basic lip-synch, you may wish to go into the static mouth shape layers and animate the mouth shapes a little in order to add variety and emotion to your character's mouth positions. 

You can also use this lip-synching technique to animate eye movement, or indeed any other movement where you can switch between a limited range of shapes. 

If you'd like to discuss creating still or animated cartoons using software such as Moho, come along to the Graphics SIG. We meet at 7.30pm on the third Monday of every month, in the Melb PC SIG room. 

Note: All prices mentioned were current recommended retail prices at the time of writing.

Reprinted from the July 2001 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia